Last week I had the opportunity to take candids at a family wedding (we had a paid photographer for the shoots). It was a real low light event and I was shooting at 3200 ISO. The photos are really noisy - much noisier than the samples I have seen online for the 5dII. Most likely those were taken at 3200 ISO but were not taken in low light. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any software that does a better job at removing noise than PS. Seems like it doesn't work so well.

I too would recommend Topaz for the situation that Norman has. It has a banding removal function that does a pretty good job on the banding noise that tends to show up on 5D2 high-ISO/dark/under-exposed shots.

That said, I think I must have a pretty decent copy of the 5D2 since I rarely notice severe banding noise unless I really go looking for it, and that goes up to about 6400 ISO. Lightroom (4) or ACR (CS6) noise removal does the job for me in the majority of cases.

Thanks everyone for your responses. My pics look like colored sand, zoomed in. Quite a few were somewhat dark, because people were dancing, moving, etc so I had to have a 180 shutter speed. Should have rented a faster lens. Was using a Contax 645N adapted (slower) lense and a 70-200 F4. An extra stop makes a lot of difference.

It would be helpful if you could post a sample or even give us access to a throw-away raw file with the noise.

As I said, I have some pretty dark and high-ISO shots and they are reasonably recoverable using just the noise reduction in ACR or LR. For dark and unimportant areas, it can sometimes be as easy as just darkening the shadows until they go black.

Some are more tolerant of noise. For me any noise I can see at 100% is objectionable. I use Topaz and think it works pretty well. I will sacrifice detail to get clean images and for my 5d3, Iso 1600 is about max and less on dark images.

I never had a 5D2, but my 1dsmk3 which was pretty close was topped out at ISO800.

ben egbert wrote:
Some are more tolerant of noise. For me any noise I can see at 100% is objectionable.

One of the things to consider in applying NR is the final output and scale. For example if I intend to serve up cropped 1300x900 (bout 30% scale) digital images on the web then I'm like you - zero tolerance. If it's more like full image 800x600 or 640x480 (about 12% scale) then most noise isn't detectable anyway. If the output is to be print then NR isn't very critical. Most 6,400 ISO images from the GH2 appear to have zero noise in an 8x12 print a meter away - even with only lite NR applied in ACR alone - which is probably the worst NR on the market BTW.

I can download it and put it to the test on some SLR/C files on my laptop ... should only take about 3 hours per image on my old laptop.

WOW ... really 15-20 minutes per image. Obviously not oriented for event / production work. I'll give it a go I'm sure I can shoot the SLR/C @ max ISO 800 in low light. Oughta be a torture test of sorts. Actually, here it is with outdoor night band 1D II N @ 3200 shots first. No adjustments of any kind to program settings or file other than selecting no NR, High NR or PRIME NR (at defaults).

I'm not seeing any diff between HIGH vs. PRIME ... probably operator error. Not seeing any 15 minute processing time either. Possible that PRIME is not functioning on this machine/OS due to RAM or 32 bit limits ... just guessing, but I see no diff yet ... will continue to see what I can learn.